The following relates generally to remote control systems and, more particularly, relates to a system and method for monitoring remote control transmissions.
Devices adapted to unobtrusively monitor the tuning of a home entertainment center are known in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,235,414 describes a device adapted to work with the remote controls of the various appliances that comprise the home entertainment center. The device functions to receive a signal from the remote controls, determine which appliance was the intended target of the signal, send an infrared signal to the intended target appliance, and store tuning information. In this manner, the stored information may be retrieved at a later time and used to determine program ratings.
While the system described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,235,414 performs adequately when it is only desired to simply monitor the transmission of command codes to a home entertainment center, what is needed is a system that functions to provide an indication to a remote control user that one or more transmitted command codes were not properly received by the home entertainment center. In this regard, remote controls commonly provide for the transmission of a sequence of command codes in response to activation of a macro key, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,959,751. By way of example, a macro can be used to transmit a sequence of command codes to power on all appliances of a home entertainment center, to access pay-per-view events via a set-top box, etc. However, owing to the length of typical command code sequences comprising a macro, it is not uncommon for one or more of the command codes within the sequence to fail to reach the home entertainment center. The failure to successfully transmit all of the command codes from the remote control to the home entertainment center may arise from the user pointing the remote control away from the home entertainment center, from the transmission being temporarily interrupted by a passing person, etc. Accordingly, it is desired to provide a system and method that functions to signal a remote control and/or inform a remote control user that a sequence of command codes was not properly received by the home entertainment center to, among other things, allow the remote control and/or user to ensure that the home entertainment center is placed into the desired state.